Australia is unique in playing host to four professional winter football codes, each with their own dedicated following and traditions. Two of these, soccer and rugby union, have long been considered the minnows of Australian winter sport, but both are riding new waves of popularity, with renewed predictions that the round-ball game may eventually trump its rivals for the affections of the majority of sports fans in Australia (and for youngsters pulling on football boots for the first time) just as it has long been the No1 football code the world over for more than a century now.

The two most popular codes in Australia, certainly in terms of television viewing audiences and spectator numbers (if not in overall numbers of registered players) are rugby league and Australian football.

Both would like to be the king of the paddock, but each faces considerable barriers to achieving this ambition. Rugby league is going through something of a trough: its top-ranked players were not long ago among the best paid footballers in Australia, but dwindling TV audiences have seen them slip down the salary pecking order. Attendance figures have been flat in recent years and big-name players are being lured away from league to play rugby union. It's a development some suggest threatens the integrity of the National Rugby League's salary cap; the mechanism that administrators rely on to keep the game and the clubs viable. Added to that are tensions between the NRL and New Ltd, which owns several teams, and which bankrolls the rugby union Super 14 competition through its interest in Foxtel. Though the NRL has spread the 13-a-side game to Melbourne, it has at the same time seen other codes, particularly soccer and Australian football, successfully encroach on its NSW and Queensland strongholds.

Competition between the various codes, for publicity, for new fans, for TV revenue, for sponsorship and, in the case of the two rugbys, even players, is intense, and no opportunity to court interest groups is passed up by administrators. The AFL's decision to ''celebrate'' the 150th anniversary of the first recorded game of ''Australian football'', a match played between two Melbourne public schools on August 7, 1858, is one example of the contest to become the undisputed No1 football code in Australia.

The game between Melbourne Grammar and Scotch College was played over two weekends, in the absence of any particular set of rules, and finished in a draw, and is thus a questionable event to celebrate. Nevertheless, the AFL maintains it was the first authentic game of Australian football, and it wants fans to dress up in club colours tomorrow and to bring a football to work or to school for a spot of old-fashioned kick to kick at lunch time. The rah-rahs, or rugby union followers, the soccer fans, and the no-nonsense league diehards, will probably scoff at the temerity of the AFL in staging a confected celebration. Indeed, a surer bet would have been for the AFL to commemorate the sesquicentenary of the first game played under a distinctly Australian code of rules, on May 17 next year. Perhaps it's a case of no promoter being able to resist two bites at the cherry.

Scoffing from NSW and Queensland aside, there is cause for the AFL to celebrate. The game is the most watched of all football codes in Australia, and the wealthiest. It is dominant in four states and one territory and is gaining ground in the rugby league strongholds of NSW and Queensland. It also has the broadest appeal of all the football codes: crowds at AFL matches are notable for the numbers of young families and women. That stems in part from the fact that it is a game that caters to children of all shapes and sizes, and that it is a relatively benign sport.

Soccer is the one code that matches the appeal of Australian football for mothers guiding their children towards organised team sports for the first time, and though kids have been drawn to junior leagues in large numbers, relatively few of them have shown much inclination to persevere with the game to the top-tier leagues though an administrative overhaul of the game in 2003, which culminated in the creation of a new national league, and a new lease of life for the national team at World Cup level, will improve the game's attractiveness.

Unlike soccer and the two rugby codes, Australian football is played virtually nowhere else in the world a deficiency which administrators are trying to address by creating bridgeheads in Japan, New Zealand and even Israel.

It's doubtful, however, that the game will ever appeal to overseas audiences as anything other than a boutique sport. But that is no reason to suppose that the game might eventually wither in Australia. It remains the quintessential national game, popular across all demographics and with all ethnic groups, particularly among indigenous Australians.

It has a devoted and loyal following, and is probably the best administered of all the codes reason enough for a celebration.